marking the occasion

I was walking down the central thoroughfare in the grocery store today after work, and slowed my pace to peer down an aisle, trying to remember if we needed canned beans. There I spied a narrow back belonging to a fair-headed man in a t shirt and black jeans. He was leaning over his cart, elbows resting on the handle as he made some similar domestic calculation. I saw him fleetingly, less than a second as I walked by, but the hunch of his shoulders was so like Mike. Something about the frame, the posture. What a gut punch. A gut-and-heart punch. I pulled over in the next aisle and looked at the teas, breathing, waiting for the tears tightening my throat to relax and sink back down to their usual quiet depths. Mike. You surprised me.

Tomorrow will mark fifty years since he was born. 

And it will mark fifty years since my boyfriend Thomas was born.

It will mark forty-nine years since my glamorous twenty-five year old parents were married in Pittsburgh, and 104 years since my grandfather was born in Texas, the only child of Roy and Fay Howell, who were forty and thirty-nine years old at the time. (How long did they struggle with infertility? Were there miscarriages? How unlikely was his birth?)

I saw on Instagram yesterday that May 23rd is a favorite barre and dance teacher's birthday too. Is she also part of the mysterious cosmic conspiracy revolving around tomorrow's date, to which I may well owe the most important parts of me, the most important of all being my very existence? Probably! 

In six days I will take Frances to the Philadelphia airport to fly to Buenos Aires for a summer internship. In seven days I will file into our town's minor league baseball stadium to cheer on seven hundred McCaskey High School graduates, and my shining son Gabriel will be among them. A few days after that I will help him pack many disparate items off an extensive packing list that I cannot seem to contend with yet and cram them into our little EV, and drive him to the Smoky Mountains for 6 weeks of being a CIT followed directly by a month of adventuring in Wyoming. 

And tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Beatrice from four days on the Chesapeake Bay with her fellow sixth graders, just in time to take a rhubarb upside down cake to the cemetery where we can cry and laugh in that sacred place that brings us a hair's breath closer to Mike than we are in regular life. Then on Saturday we'll go to Philadelphia to celebrate Thomas's half century on this planet in style. He will be fifty years old, and that is very, very good. I smile typing it.  

I have zero answers in response to the open question that is tomorrow. How can Mike and Thomas have the exact same birthday?* How can a person grieve and celebrate all at once? How can I find the vast space I need inside to hold it all? 

And more than that, how I can live these impossibilities while I continue to go through the many motions required to help my two oldest children set out for distant shores and become ever more independent of the nest I have poured my heart into for the past twenty years? This nest barely resembles that one I first feathered with Mike. It's full of lanky teenage boys' laughter, skin care products, a lunatic barking dog, opinions about protein intake, episodes of The Americans, internet-fueled slang I cannot keep up with, cat hair, smelly running shoes, expensive ice cream, and interruption-peppered conversations about politics and school and relationships and history and AI and media and books and other people and feelings. These days, the only thing I'm allowed to read out loud to them is the Vows section of the Sunday Times (thanks Beatrice). 

Nonetheless this nest, such as it is, holds our shared memories of being a family of five. The exquisite heaviness of all the change hits me hard sometimes. It's my forever problem - one more impossible space to live inside of - I love to see them grow, and I love them just exactly the way they are right now. 

So, right. No answers. Only love-as-grief, love-as-tenderness, love-as-unease, love-as-bafflement. 

In other words a heart, full to the brim.

*Astrologists, I welcome your thoughts.